Music Feature

Poetic Connections

The Kelly Writer’s House at Penn is a quiet place, but as
each of the nine Penn poets reads, his/her friends go wild. The leader of the
event is overjoyed, because readings are rarely this packed and popular. “Let’s
get loud for poetry!” she exclaims.

Tonight is called We
All Feel Like It, a part of the Whenever
We Feel Like It series. Each poet masterfully performs their words for the
audience, and as the night goes on it becomes clear that their poetry does not simply
stand alone. Instead, the poems seem to be pieces of intricate conversations
already in progress.

Take Leo Amino, who shares poems that come from an email
chain of poetic expression. He has a woman from the chain join him at the front
of the room, demonstrating how her words led to his.

Then there is Trisha Low. Trisha reads letters she wrote
to other poets, like Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olsen, to whom she begins “Hi
Charlie.” Trisha’s effervescence
makes her voice dance along the edges of her words. Her language is a beautiful
blend of colloquial speech and poetic rhythm.

Not everyone’s conversations are as direct. Henry
Steinberg expresses the complications of his relationship with his brother: “I
mean, I’m not, we’re still…” The poem is a cacophony of stuttery, unfinished
sentences. Through the uneven breaks Henry expresses his and his brother’s
inability to converse on the same level.

Some of the poets tell explicit stories while others keep
the audience in the abstract. But everyone brings the meaning of their poems
into a context that the audience will understand. Through the unique
introductions—what they call their biographies—we learn how the poets want to
be seen. The bio of Florentina Dragulescu, who writes on sexuality and on how boys
see girls if they say “no”, says that “if you look very closely at these lives
you may see your own bad behavior.” John Bang claims he is a “library of every
feeling you cannot purchase,” warning us never to call him a bookstore. Amaris
Cuchanski is “a word in French that doesn’t exist.”

This event was the perfect way to get more people to “get
loud for poetry.” The reading was at Penn, and the readers were from Penn. So,
the student audience already had a connection without even knowing the poets
personally. And poetry is, after all, a form of connecting, of conversing. In
one of her poems, Amaris says, “we make closeness out of fabricated fiction.”
In the Writer’s House tonight, nothing feels fabricated or fiction at all.